Title: "Kenneth Key (Observation)"
Medium: Print Installation
Dimensions: Six prints, dimensions variable
Date of Completion: 2019, New Deal Gallery, Little Rock, Arkansas
Medium: Print Installation
Dimensions: Six prints, dimensions variable
Date of Completion: 2019, New Deal Gallery, Little Rock, Arkansas
Description: Eight small drawings of Kenneth Key line the perimeter of the gallery, surrounding a dot located at the center of the gallery’s floor. The dot signifies the single security guard in a panopticon prison, housed in an inspection tower at the center of the prison’s rotunda. Each drawing’s dimensions reflect the size of a prisoner’s face at Stateville Correctional Center as viewed by the prison guard. By viewing each drawing from the dot, the viewer can thus imagine the distance between them and the prisoner as if they were the prison guard observing them.
The Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, where Kenneth Key is serving life in prison, is a panopticon, an institutional and architectural system of control originally designed in the 18th century to reduce the number of security guards in a prison to one by placing a single watchtower, equipped with window blinds, at the center of the prison’s rotunda, from which a guard may view the entire prison. In this watchtower, the security guard is concealed, allowing them to survey the prisoners in their cells invisibly. In his 1791 description of the panopticon, the designer Jeremy Bentham calls this form of surveillance an “invisible omnipresence,” and later in 1843, a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”
In phenomenology, the term “the other” identifies “the other human being, in his and her differences from the Self.” Thus, in analyzing artworks that represent “the other,” one must also recognize themselves. A portrait provides knowledge along with security, allowing the viewer to examine the other invisibly. This is also a form of surveillance.
